1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an IP (intellectual property) characterization methodology. More particularly, the present invention relates to an input capacitance characterization methodology of an IP component by circuit recognition, extraction, and simulation.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic design automation (EDA) system is a form of computer aided design (CAD) system and is used for designing integrated circuit (IC) devices. The EDA system typically receives one or more high level behavioral descriptions of an IC device (e.g., in HDL languages like VHDL, Verilog, HSPICE, and etc.) and translates this high level behavioral descriptions into netlists of various levels of abstraction. At a higher level of abstraction, a generic netlist is typically produced based on library primitives. The generic netlist can be translated into a lower level technology-specific netlist based on a technology-specific library. A netlist, describing the IC design, is composed of nodes (elements) and edges, e.g. connections between nodes, and can be represented using a directed cyclic graph structure having nodes connected to each other with signal lines. A single node can have multiple fan-ins and multiple fan-outs. The netlist is typically stored in computer readable media within the EDA system and processed and verified using many well known techniques. One result is a physical mask layout to directly implement structures in silicon to realize the physical IC device.
In developing IC, different kinds of automation tools played significant roles in, such as function verification, layout, electricity analysis and simulation.
In addition, in order to meet the requirements of more intensive circuitry and fewer development cycles, how to develop an economical IC has become a major topic for development engineers now, and circuitry design reusing is one of the useful techniques. In other words, by reusing, well designed functional circuitries can be repeatedly used to build up a new Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). Therefore, the IC development process can be completed faster. Here, the well designed circuitry layout that can be repeatedly used is also known as an IP (Intellectual Property) component.
In general, characteristic of the IP component is estimated when the IP component is completed. In use of the IP component, the manual characterization of the IP component may be not completed.
In the prior art, various characterization data are determined and provided by development engineers based on their own professional knowledge and working experience, and the characterization data are sequentially and manually input into the system with the help of a simulation program so as to obtain simulation reports. Key values (e.g. timing, power, etc.) are manually extracted from the simulation reports, and the extracted key values are manually keyed in to generate an IP characteristic library for subsequent development process. Furthermore, for considering time efficiency, in the manually input, it is impossible/impractical to obtain the complete characterization data. Some manual guess or manual interpolation of faked data are mixed into a release library and thus a complete or correct IP characteristic library cannot be obtained.
As IP designs grow bigger, IPs may contain more than 500K transistors. The growing number of transistors increases the difficulty for circuit simulation software, such as SPICE, in solving the circuit matrix; thereby the non-convergence problem is very common for more 90% of IPs. Besides, the time-to-market of IP delivery and ASIC design is critical. As the size of IP grows bigger and simulation run-time grows exponentially. This is an NP (Non-Polynomial) problem. So, it is impractical to get the input and output capacitance through the whole IP simulation. Some tools provide I-V curve or circuit simplification to reduce the run-time; however, the accuracy is not good enough and the reduction in run-time is limited. Besides, the cost of those licenses is another concern.
For non-standard cells, models of SPICE or other simulation software are used to analyze the target cell for obtaining characteristics. If the target cell under simulation is very complicated, the simulation time is exponentially and dramatically increased. Accordingly, the use of the SPICE simulation software to analyze the input capacitance characterization of the target cell, such as the IP cell, wastes a lot of time and becomes impractical/impossible.
A fast and generic algorithm for IP characterization, i.e., input capacitance characterization, with partial circuit extraction and simulation is desired.